Paragon Real Estate of SF acquired by Compass to form...

2of2Paragon Real Estate, which marketed this Noe Valley home in 2014, is being sold to Compass.Photo: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press 2014

Compass, a New York real estate brokerage firm, has acquired Paragon Real Estate Group to form San Francisco’s largest residential brokerage firm.

Paragon was founded in 2004 in San Francisco. It has 236 agents in offices in San Francisco, Greenbrae and Danville listed on its website. Compass’ website shows about 275 agents or multi-agent teams in the Bay Area.

“With the addition of Paragon, Compass’ Bay Area team has grown to more than 500 agents representing more than $4.5 billion in sales volume last year. Compass is now the number one real estate company in San Francisco by sales volume and market share,” Compass said in a press release.

This year in San Francisco only, Paragon ranked No. 2 with $875.6 million in transaction volume and Compass ranked No. 4 with $867.3 million. Their combination would easily put them ahead of market leader Pacific Union International, which had $914.7 million in volume, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors.

In the Bay Area, Paragon ranked seventh and Compass 14th on a list of brokerage firms ranked by gross sales throughout the region in 2017 compiled by the San Francisco Business Times.

Based on volume nationwide, Compass ranked sixth in the U.S. with just over $14 billion in gross sales, just behind San Francisco-based Pacific Union, according to a list complied by Real Trends, an industry data publisher. Paragon ranked 89th on that list with nearly $2.3 billion in gross volume, two spots behind Zephyr Real Estate of San Francisco. Those numbers represent the value of transactions their agents were involved in, not how much the firms or their agents earned on those deals.

Paragon was founded by Bob Dadurka, Anita Head, George McNabb and Sally Stull.

Compass was co-founded by Ori Allon, who sold his previous company, Julpan, to Twitter in 2011. Previously, he worked at Google after selling a patented search algorithm, Orion, to the company. It operates in 17 U.S. markets, according to its website.

Neither company made its top executives available for comment. Terms were not disclosed.

Kathleen Pender writes the Net Worth column in The San Francisco Chronicle. She explains how the big business and economic news of the day affect a household's net worth. She covers saving, investing, debt, taxes, housing, mortgages, retirement plans, employment and unemployment with a focus on issues specific to California and the Bay Area.

When it comes to big financial decisions, she believes that the simplest answer is almost always the best and that people would stay out of money trouble if they didn't get involved in things they can't understand. Pender welcomes questions from readers and frequently answers them in her column.

She majored in business journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia and was a Knight-Bagehot fellow in business journalism at Columbia University.